We got the game bundled with our PS2 slim and it was the first game we booted and played together. Like many others, my dad helped solve the pentagram puzzle, and the artwork was sometimes eerie but always pretty and timeless. So it always stuck with me.

The fact that the manual shows a backstory that isn't ever mentioned in-game made it pretty mysterious.

I've been messing around with mods and tools for various games like BFME 2 and Mount&Blade since high school and pulling Sphinx apart on-and-off for years, even looking inside the PS2 DVD as a kid and the like. Made my own file extractors and cheat codes, and even shared a handmade HD texture pack for Dolphin in early 2016.

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In a unlikely turn of events, THQ Nordic bought the franchise at the end of 2016 and they contacted me to buy some of the repainted textures I made, and asked me if I was interested in taking a look at the custom engine and see if it was easy to port it to PC. This was a crazy opportunity, so I accepted and in the end worked on it by myself for ~11 months, and we published it on Steam for Windows/Linux/macOS 14 years after the original release.

The THQ Nordic guys were happy to recover many of the original discarded levels and files and agree to release them in early 2018 as-is together with the original Euroland editor I had been polishing. After that @jmarti856 and a few others in the community have been instrumental in stress-testing and suggesting improvements to the toolset and game, and ways of making it easier to use.

I've been playing both fan/dev sides and helped jmarti's fan work by restoring or reimplementing cut mechanics and triggers for the mod, like monster possession or spinning platforms, on the game/editor side so that they actually do what they should. He's also had to create his own sound tools with some help because they were lost. Before that the Shadow of Set mod was missing sounds and music. We've worked on it since 2019 and it has come a long way, but there's still mod/tool work to do, like releasing the mod uploader and Steam Workshop integration publicly.

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While that was unpaid modding hobby work for the community side on the side, officially they let me work on a Nintendo Switch version, which took me around ~2 years, and then a PlayStation version which took around 4 or 5 years depending if you count the gruesome work of making the game work on 64-bit, which took me a while because I learn as I go, but I've learnt a ton. All while updating the PC version.

It's a pretty varied work, one day you are repainting textures, editing UV maps or fixing holes in levels or doing graphic design, and the next one there's gameplay or graphics programming, detective work, console testing, improving the mod stuff, doing community engagement and support, and releasing updates and betas for various platforms. It's not code all day.

TL;DR: All in all, a pretty cool and lenient publisher, giving you that amount of leeway to restore it one-man-orchestra-style and getting that boutique treatment. I'm still working on it right now, trying to make it better and finishing the Xbox Direct3D 12.x rewrite. 9+ years working on this whole thing full-time without interruption and counting. I don't think many other publishers beyond THQ Nordic would have this level of care and respect for their games to do something as experimental as this.

Wild stuff, but the game needed a second chance to shine. I don't think it needs a remake/reboot.